Lower than vermin: Osborne plans end to crisis fund for the vulnerable
A safety-net fund for people hit by floods, fire, domestic violence or a shortage of food or money is to be axed if George Osborne has his way.
Local welfare assistance provision – a Coalition policy designed to provide help to tens of thousands of people on low incomes who are pitched into sudden difficulty – currently takes just £180 million from the national budget. This is a tiny amount compared with – for example – the £1.5 billion spent on Michael Gove’s ‘Free Schools’ vanity project.
It seems a plan has been put forward to keep the fund, at a lower level of just £70 million.
But The Guardian has reported that “Osborne had fought against a ‘tiny sliver’ of money going to some of the most vulnerable”.
Campaigning site 38 Degrees has launched an emergency petition for British people to tell Osborne this is a cut too far.
Spokesman David Babbs wrote to members: “Without this crucial safety net stricken families would be left penniless and without food. He could announce the cut later today – let’s try to stop him.
“As a proportion of government spending, the sums of money involved are pretty small. But this is about the kind of Britain we want to live in. Can it really be right to scrap emergency support for people hit by crisis? Do we really want to leave people in hardship to suffer? To rely on food banks? Or even worse, loan sharks?
“Osborne’s latest plan is a cut too far – even other government ministers are coming out against it. The Guardian is reporting that other ministers are feeling the pressure over ‘the unpopularity of welfare cuts and the rising use of food banks’. A huge public outcry, just as MPs are getting ready to go home for Christmas, could split the government further – and force Osborne to back down.
“If George Osborne manages to scrap this fund, people could be left with nowhere to turn.”
The petition is at https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/osborne-christmas-cuts
Please tell Osborne what you think of his plan to cut down the last safety net available to this country’s most vulnerable people.
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“No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now.”
An excerpt from a 1948 speech by Nye Bevan. Nothing at all has changed since then and, if anything, today’s loathsome Nasty Party is even nastier.
So true, and yet depressing that Tory policy for us hasn’t moved at all in the last 70 years – they still resent the post-War social contract, and are now busy dismantling it. It took so long and so much hardship to get the welfare state, and it has taken so little to undo it
Sometimes I look at France and think, what would the UK be today if we had had a revolution and dispatched all the aristocracy and their sycophants? It really couldn’t be nly worse than the Eton Junta running the UK now, could it?
I really wouldn’t put anything past these EVIL B*****DS IN THE COALITION, they who vote any of these two political parties TORY and LIBDEMS really will deserve what they get, the people who are left to suffer could be members of THEIR own families who will be sentenced to more and more suffering under these evil b*****ds.
My word their timing is impeccable what an evil shower their time will come be sure and I pray it is soon, bunch of murderers.
Well, if vulnerable people received money then it might prevent them from dying. Now George Osborne wouldn’t want that, because it would conflict with Tory policy.
Horrid, shameless, pathetic! typical uptight Tory mentality, no regard whatsoever for the less privileged, only bothered about the wellbeing of their wealthy & influential cohort.